Sherry
B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. She
received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from
the University of Chicago. Before coming to UCLA in 2004, she
taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Michigan, the
University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University. She has
received numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the
National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation. She has done extensive fieldwork with the
Sherpas of Nepal, on religion, politics, and the Sherpas’ involvement
in Himalayan mountaineering. Her final book on the Sherpas, Life and Death on Mt. Everest, was awarded the J.I. Staley prize for the best anthropology book of 2004.

In
the early ‘90s, Ortner switched her research to the United
States. Her first project was on the meanings and workings of
social class in the United States, using the members of her own high
school graduating class as her ethnographic subjects. Her second
American project looks at the world of independent filmmaking, and the
dark view of American society that emerges through the lens of
independent film. She also publishes regularly in the areas of
cultural theory and feminist theory. She has been elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded the Retzius
Medal of the Society of Anthropology and Geography of Sweden.